Everyone Meets Everyone

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A type of Premiere where the cast of characters are collected together one by one. Some of them may already know each other (occasionally all of them) but this is the story of how they get together to be an identifiable unit of people. Hopefully, the episode won't end with someone saying "And I'm sure we'll have many great adventures together!"

Common in reality shows, when new people arrive in a season premiere.

Everyone Meets Everyone episodes can also come later in the series, often told through Flashback scenes. The West Wing did this in "In the Shadow of Two Gunmen", and Firefly did in "Out of Gas". It is also a common Fan Fic premise.

Debut Queue is Everyone Meets Everyone drawn out over several episodes.

Chapter 116 of WORKING!! not only showed how the main cast members got employed in the restaurant Wagnaria note the setting of the series, but also how their individual quirks actually got them the jobs in the first place!

Comic Books

An unusual case in Runaways, which opens with the main characters hanging out during what we are told is their parents' annual meeting. So while it's not the first time that they meet, not only can one assume their original meeting was somewhat similar, it is also when they first become a "team", making it their Avengers Assemble moment.

Used frequently in Super Hero comics where a new superhero team in complete. In fact, one of the easiest ways to decompress the origin story is to introduce the characters one per issue over a multi issue premiere arc.

All of Marvel Comics heroes met for the first time in Contest of Champions #1. Most of them had already met, but this was the first time that every single superhero was in the same place at the same time (courtesy of the Cosmic Entity The Grandmaster, who needed to choose heroes for the contest). Note that only handful of the heroes actually participated in the actual contest, including some brand-new ones.

In The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Mina (the head of the League) is introduced to Nemo, then the two of them are sent to dredge Quatermain out of an opium den. They then go on to apprehend Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde in Paris, then catch Hawley Griffin molesting schoolgirls in a boarding school.

This is how Transformers: More than Meets the Eye begins, with most of the cast gradually making their way on-board the Lost Light throughout the first issue. The command trio are already on-board, Red Alert is checking newcomers at the front door (meeting Brainstorm, Rung and Swerve while there). Meanwhile, Ratchet, Chromedome and Rewind are making their way to the ship on foot (Rewind only being able to turn into a memory stick). They're interrupted by Whirl and Cyclonus trying to kill one another, only being interrupted when Tailgate manages to get free from a hole he'd been in for over four million years, before passing out.

According to the writer, there was supposed to be another character (Skids) introduced in the first issue, but with no space he gets moved to the second issue instead.

The Muppet Movie shows how the Muppet troupe got together. (Well, sort of. As Kermit puts it, "It's kind of approximately how it happened.")

The heist in Fast Five requires a Badass Crew...which means bringing together major players from the previous four movies (Brian, Dom, and Mia from the original, Rome and Tej from 2 Fast, Han Lue from Tokyo Drift, and Gisele from Fast & Furious).

In the first Animorphs book, the heroes meet at the local mall and decide to walk part of the way home together by taking a shortcut through an abandoned construction site. This is before any of them get involved with aliens or Voluntary Shapeshifting, and though they all already knew each other to some extent, they were not a collective group until this moment. Previous to this meeting their various relationships were one-to-one between the various members; Jake/Marco and Rachel/Cassie were best friends, Jake/Rachel were cousins, Jake/Tobias were minor friends after Jake saved Tobias from bullies at school, and Jake/Cassie had mutual crushes on each other. After this night they became a solitary group of friends committed to the fight against the Yeerks, but they had to maintain the cover that nothing had changed to avoid being discovered, so whenever they were in public they had to make it look like they were not "a group."

In the first Harry Potter book, Harry meets Ron, most of the Weasleys, Hermione, Neville, Crabbe, Goyle, Dumbledore, McGonagall etc. for the first time all on the same day. (His only previous contact with wizards was with Malfoy, Hagrid and Ollivander.) Harry, Ron, Hermione, Neville and McGonagall are all meeting each other for the first time. Completely justified, as it's the first day of school and they're all either students or teachers.

The main cast are all gathered together as old friends at the beginning of Dragons Of Autumn Twilight, first book in the Dragonlance series.

The novel The Alienist gathers the team members for dinner at Delmonico's.

The entire first half of The Fellowship of the Ring. Frodo sets out with Sam, then adds Merry and Pippin, Aragorn joins up in Bree, and then the rest of the Fellowship gets assembled in Rivendell.

Water Margin has an entire chapter dedicated to this, but because there are 108main characters - some of whom have noteable back stories - it's not until about seven-tenths into the novel that all the heroes are finally gathered at Liangshan Marsh.

Live Action Television

In the pilot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Buffy comes to Sunnydale. Giles reveals he is her Watcher. Later, Xander overhears them talking about vampires. Buffy saves Willow from a vampire attack. From this point on, Buffy, Giles, Xander and Willow are a team.

Aversion: Heroes didn't do this till the very last episode of the first season, and even then some characters ended up being left out, simply because the series has Loads and Loads of Characters, with more on the way. An example: Hiro, a main character, did not meet the Haitian (a recurring character from season one) until season three IN THE PRESENT. They meet in the future and Hiro assumes present Haitian is just as bad as future Haitian. This was Lampshaded in season 2, when Hiro Nakamura encounters Matt Parkman and Nathan Petrelli. Hiro immediately shouts his (second) catchphrase: "Flying man!". Parkman's reaction is: "And who's this?" This was Lampshaded when a couple of comic geeks start arguing about whether or not Hiro and Claire had ever met.

Star Trek: The Next Generation starts with Picard taking command of his new ship, the Enterprise, and him and the crew getting acquainted. It turns out that some of the officers have past connections with each other, but for the most part, they're all strangers to each other.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine starts with the various Starfleet crew members arriving at the station and causing friction with the Bajoran Militia personnel who had been running it. Once again, a few cast members are old friends (or enemies).

In Star Trek: Voyager's pilot, about half of the ship's officers and skilled staffers were killed, forcing the captain to accept various Maquis rebels, area aliens, and even computer programs as replacements.

Firefly's pilot Serenity added a number of characters to the existing crew (Book, Simon and River) with their first meeting as part of the plot. However, because the pilot was not shown as the first episode, the characters had to be (re)introduced to the audience without retconning the first episode out of continuity (although the film later retconned a number of aspects of the unaired pilot anyway).

There were also echoes of Everyone Meets Everyone in a second episode, Out Of Gas, which showed how the original crew met through flashbacks, and Mal's purchase of Serenity.

In a precise inversion of the Firefly example, Crusade was intended to start In Medias Res, but Executive Meddling demanded an Everyone Meets Everyone episode, which was severely rushed through production and is very unpopular with fans.

Although starting off with a Welcome Episode for Gwen Cooper, Torchwood used flashbacks to show how the rest of the team were recruited.

Lost begins with the plane crash in which the majority of the principal characters meet, and by the end of the pilot they all seem to become good friends. More characters are added and taken away during the course of the show, however it seems to be that latecomers, especially the tailies don't seem to last as long as anyone else. This idea is also used as a plot device with Arzt, Nikki and Paulo.

In That '70s Show episode "Class Picture", the main characters, in search of a quote for their yearbook, start remembering how they first met.

The first episode of Leverage has Nate called in by Victor Dubinich to lead a con with Parker, Hardison, and Eliot. Sophie (an old friend/foe of Nate's) is called in later when the team is double-crossed and they need to take Dubinich down. By the end of the second episode, they decide to stay together as a team and pull more cons on deserving marks.

Made In Chelsea the first episode has many of the main characters meeting for the first time.

Game of Thrones starts out this way: Pretty much all of the principal cast (save the Targaryens, who are in exile) get to meet during a royal visit to Winterfell castle (even though not for the first time), under the guise of at least nominally civil coexistence. Needless to say, from that moment forward, they learn to properly detest each other, and things begin to fall apart almost immediately.

Pinball

Done in Avatar for "Na'vi Multiball", which requires the player to first gather up all six Na'vi.

Tabletop Games

Some tabletop RPGs encourage the GMs to make the players stage this, if their characters are to play in extended chronicles. Or maybe it's just to avert the You All Meet in an Inn scenario and its "you were drunk enough to risk your life with a bunch of shady strangers" implication. An example of this is The World of Darkness and Exalted

Welcome to Poe, one of the first Whateley Universe stories, where six kids start their freshman year at Whateley Academy and find out they have something unusual in common. It's what makes such a diverse group into a team.

Western Animation

Total Drama Island's first episode has all the campers meeting each other for the first time (with the exception of Katie and Sadie who were already BFFFLs before the show). It takes up about the first 11 minutes of the first episode for this to get done, seeing how it's 22 contestants.

Futurama: Fry gets unfrozen, meets Leela (his career placement officer), runs away from her and meets Bender in a suicide booth. And together they meet the Professor, who is Fry's great-great-great (and so on) nephew, who hires the three of them (including Leela, who turned her back on her own career rather than force Fry into his designated role) as his new delivery crew. The second episode introduces the trio to the rest of the cast already employed at the Professor's delivery company: Hermes Conrad, the company's bureaucrat; Zoidberg, the doctor; and Amy, the college intern. A much later episode tells how the Professor and Dr. Zoidberg met.

Drawn Together, largely because of its premise as a reality show parody.

The Teen Titans animated series did the latter variety, where the show started off with the whole team already assembled and the Everyone Meets Everyone episode was done as a flashback later on in the series.

In W.I.T.C.H. Irma, Taranee, Cornelia and Hay Lin were already friends prior to the start of the series. Will moves in and is taken into their circle (mostly because Hay Lin's grandmother is ready to set them up to be a team). Then Caleb shows up (and gets captured soon after) and when Will gets captured, the other girls meet Blunk in the process of saving both Will and Caleb.

The first episode of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, in which Twilight Sparkle meets the rest of the mane cast for the first time, and their quest to defeat Nightmare Moon helps them bond as a group of friends. (In subsequent episodes, it's also implied that some of the other ponies knew each other but are only now becoming proper friends.)

The first episode of Dinotrux features an unusually friendly T-Trux named Ty moving into a new area after his old home was destroyed by a volcano were he makes an unlikely friend and realizes Dinotrux work much better together than alone, and subsequently recruits the group of friends that features in the rest of the series.

Defenders of the Earth: Most of "Escape from Mongo", the first episode in the series, is spent bringing the Defenders together, a process which is helped somewhat by the fact that the team consists of three parent/child duos and one adoptive parent/adopted child duo. In addition, Mandrake and Lothar are Heterosexual Life-Partners, so, with the addition of LJ and Kshin, half the team is already assembled at the start of the series, which opens with Flash's spaceship crash-landing in the grounds of Mandrake's mansion. Rick joins when Flash, Mandrake and Lothar rescue him from Mongo; the Phantom and Jedda are recruited shortly after. It's also indicated that Mandrake knew Flash and the Phantom, at least by reputation, prior to his first onscreen meetings with the two characters.

Time Squad: The first episode has the two main adult characters, Buck Tuddrussel and Larry 3000, partners in a time police organization from the far future, accidentally zap into the bedroom of an orphaned child named Otto Osworth in the year 2001. Otto convinces Tuddrussel to take him with them, as he knows more about history than they do. Thus, the incompetent duo becomes a successful trio and eventually a makeshift family where they admittedly call Otto's "kidnapping" an "adoption" instead.

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